The Sun Also Rises

"Many people don’t appreciate what a big commitment writing this novel was for Hemingway. He was used to writing short stories . It meant he had to spend a lot of time on one book that could have been spent more profitably writing short stories. Like many of Hemingway’s later novels, it is stitched together from shorter pieces – in this case, what he’d already written about Pamplona. It can be summed up by the phrase “grace under pressure”, and looks at the code of ethics that emerges from bullfighting. It starts in Paris and then goes to Spain . The main event is a bullfight in Pamplona. The main characters are a group of expatriates, including a Jewish man, Robert Cohn, who was a boxing champion at Princeton. The narrator, Jake Barnes, was injured in World War One and his impotence is strongly suggested. This makes it impossible for him to consummate his relationship with Lady Brett Ashley, the femme fatale of the novel. Very closely. The book is dedicated to his first wife Hadley Richardson, who went to Pamplona with him twice. Some of the details in the book come from real life episodes. Hadley was the one given the ear of a bull by the bullfighter, although in the book Brett Ashley is the recipient. So he isn’t afraid to use real life episodes, even though he mixes them up to suit his needs. Brett is also based on the English socialite Lady Duff Twysden, a famous figure in Paris at the time and part of a group that went with Hemingway and Hadley to Pamplona. When the book came out, all his Paris acquaintances had great fun speculating about who he had based his characters on."

"I enjoyed rereading the book immensely. In picking up The Sun Also Rises today, we have the opportunity to read the book as if it were newly released, and to be amply rewarded for doing so."

"My go-to classic would have to be Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, his first novel and I think his best, a masterpiece of understatement and genuinely earned irony and deep vulnerability."

"My favorite novelists are Proust and Tolstoy, closely followed by Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps Hemingway when he isn’t beating his chest."

"I was entranced by Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," which was probably not a good thing."